Kaiser Permanente nurses strike in front of a location in Los Angeles in 2011. Photo Courtesy: CNN

Thousands Of Mental Health Workers Prepare To Strike Over 100 Kaiser Permanente Locations

Posted by: Michael Brown in Santa Clarita Latest News May 17, 2019 - 1:30 pm 0 809 Views

More than 80 percent of Kaiser Permanente mental health professionals in California, including Santa Clarita, have signed petitions authorizing an open-ended strike that could begin in June.

Roughly 4,000 psychologists, therapists, social workers and psychiatric nurses from Kaiser Permanente are set to strike if no agreement is reached on a new contract between Kaiser executives and the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW).

Both sides say they are open for negotiation while also claiming that the other party is impeding conversations.

“We reached out to all our California therapists to let them know we believe that we are on a path toward a new labor agreement,” said John Nelson, Kaiser Permanente spokesman in a statement Thursday. “NUHW leadership has responded to our communication to therapists with a daily flurry of press releases, more allegations, renewed advertising smears, and more. It’s as predictable as it is cynical.”

Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents Kaiser clinicians, echoed a similar sentiment in a statement Thursday.

“We’re ready to work with Kaiser executives to improve mental health care,” Rosselli said. “But if they insist on continuing to treat mental health patients and clinicians as second-class citizens, they will be facing a massive strike at every clinic in California.”

In December of 2018, NUHW members held the largest mental health worker strike in U.S. history to, “demand that the HMO end unacceptably long waits for patients to get therapy appointments,” according to officials. NUHW officials say that since then, the situation for Kaiser patients and caregivers has “deteriorated.”

“There is a mental health care crisis at Kaiser Permanente,” said Clement Papazian, a Kaiser Permanente psychiatric social worker, in a statement Thursday. “We won’t stop fighting until all Kaiser patients can access the mental health care that they’ve paid to receive.”

Kaiser Permanente officials claim that the union is using strikes and the threat of strikes as “bargaining tactics.”

“This threat of a strike is the tactic they’ve used before when we’ve been close to an agreement,” Nelson wrote. “It’s disappointing and disturbing that once again, union leadership is putting their bargaining tactics ahead of the needs of people who need mental health care by calling on our therapists to walk away from their patients. We had hoped for a more responsible path, one that is more considerate of patients, but union leadership is choosing a more destructive approach.”

A survey released by NUHW found that 71 percent of Kaiser Permanente clinicians across California reported that appointment wait times have grown longer over the past two years, with even larger numbers saying that they have to schedule return appointments, “further into the future than is clinically appropriate,” according to NUWH officials.

“More than 60 percent of clinicians reported that their first available return appointment was more than a month away,” according to the NUHW statement.

NUHW officials said that they have proposed measures to increase staffing, shorten wait times, and reduce referrals to out-of-network therapists who are often unavailable and cannot coordinate effectively with the rest of the Kaiser system. However, no agreement has been reached between the NUHW and Kaiser Permanente.

“If we can keep making progress, we think we can reach a strong contract that is in all our best interest, and more than that, can help create ways to return to working collaboratively to address the very real challenges we—and the nation—are grappling with in mental health care,” Nelson wrote.

Contract negotiations are still ongoing as of Friday afternoon, according to officials.